Statement

Painting Uncertainty.

I’ve been fascinated by ‘landscape’ for a long time. Why it looks the way it does? How it has evolved, been managed, used and occasionally abused? How does my personal experience of a spatial location, add significance and meaning and somehow redefine that space as ’place’? ….and can personal experience of landscape be transferred to a single visual image?

The painter renders experience into a 2D image by pushing graphite or pigment around on a surface. When combined with both physical and intellectual input, the objects characteristics switch from a perceived reality to the representational. It is representative of, but not, the landscape

For a long time, it seemed enough to say that painting … was ‘not an optical experience but an emotional one’. Over time, I’ve come to doubt the completeness of that statement simply because it seems to discount the evolving philosophical, physiological, technological, environmental and economic terrain upon which I stand and now only seems to be a partial explanation. Paintings do not directly express the artists experienced emotions, but rather the idea of emotion.

How we perceive and represent individual experience of landscape today, has come a long way since Cezanne first articulated a visual proposal that ‘sensation’ had a direct role to play in creative output. That is not to deny the huge achievement of defining the problem of how one paints the experience of standing on the slopes of Mont St Victoire. Fortunately, for all of us today he didn’t find the solution..... it’s still out there.’.